At the Threshold of Justiciable Violence: Configuring and Contesting Torture’s Production

Abstract

“Torture” is one of law’s most charged categories—burdened with distinguishing the legitimate from the illegitimate, the permitted from the prohibited forms of state violence. Embedding it in its broader discursive production, I ask: how are forms of state violence configured, controlled, and contested in, through, and by legal articulations? How are anti-torture practitioners to understand the relation between law and violence and how law legitimates some forms of violence whilst not others? How does human suffering at the hands of the state even enter the “hearing” of its law? Taking psychological torture as paradigmatic, I diagrammatically discuss how such violence is “invisibilized” and falls below definitional thresholds, due to discursive processes of active occlusion as well as epistemic limitations.